BMW M Team WRT’s four-race podium streak ended at Watkins Glen on Sunday, the #24 BMW M Hybrid V8 of Sheldon van der Linde and Dries Vanthoor finishing fourth after losing third place in the final ten minutes of the six-hour IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship round. Paul Miller Racing delivered the weekend’s bright spot with a second-place GTD-PRO finish that puts Connor De Phillippi and Neil Verhagen atop their class standings.
The streak that ended had been the defining narrative of BMW M Team WRT’s 2026 GTP campaign. Podiums at Laguna Seca, Detroit, Spa-Francorchamps, and Le Mans built momentum for a program that took over BMW’s prototype operations from BMW M Team RLL this season. Watkins Glen broke the run not through a mechanical failure or strategic misstep but because the team could not find a setup that worked on the upstate New York road course.
Van der Linde and Vanthoor qualified the #24 sixth and climbed into the top three during the race despite balance issues that left the car a few tenths short of the front-runners. The Belgian driver made the call bluntly in his post-race comments: a podium would have been a bonus given the pace deficit, and losing third with ten minutes remaining was frustrating but not a collapse. Van der Linde had driven what Vanthoor described as a great race to put the car in contention at all.
The sister #25 entry driven by Philipp Eng and Marco Wittmann had a rougher day. The same balance problems cost more lap time, a tire puncture dropped the car further back, and a drive-through penalty sealed a ninth-place finish. Eng acknowledged the weekend never came together, the car’s handling unsorted from practice through the checkered flag.
Andreas Roos, head of BMW M Motorsport, framed the fourth-place result as the kind of disappointment that reflects how far the LMDh program has come. Being unhappy with fourth is the luxury of a team that has been on the podium often enough to expect it. The FIA WEC round in São Paulo in two weeks offers the next chance to reset.
Paul Miller Racing’s GTD-PRO result was built on strategy rather than outright pace. De Phillippi and Verhagen started third in class, knew they did not have the fastest car, and banked on fuel efficiency and clean execution to stay at the front. The plan held through six hours. The second-place finish gives the duo the GTD-PRO points lead, a position De Phillippi made clear matters more than any single result.
Turner Motorsport’s GTD entry driven by Robby Foley, Patrick Gallagher, and Francis Selldorff led at points during the race but fell to seventh after a late pit stop. The team had gambled on a different strategy that required a yellow flag to work. The caution came, Foley noted, but too late to salvage a top result. The points they did collect keep them in the GTD championship conversation.
The Watkins Glen weekend sorted the field into teams that could make the circuit work and teams that could not. BMW M Team WRT landed in the latter group for the first time in five races. Whether São Paulo resets the streak or starts a different pattern is the next question.
Source: BMW. Images courtesy of BMW.
